Hear straight from our graduates.
Don’t let the roller coaster of starting a new career scare you or make you doubt your worth.
Visual Designer, McKinsey & Company
Megan Dweck
If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting at Shillington, what would it be?
Trust the process. You will get a lot of feedback and suggestions from teachers and peers and though some of it may be hard to hear, you shouldn’t shut any of it out.
You may really like something you created or an idea you had, but if you trust that everyone around you will push you to improve your work, you’ll end up with something better than you imagined it could be.
How did the course build your skill set?
In addition to internalizing the design process, the Shillington program made me a Creative Suite rock star. I appreciated that we learned application shortcuts from the start. It has definitely been a differentiating factor since I’ve entered the design field—I can do things faster and cleaner than other design-school graduates and sometimes even experienced designers say “wow, how’d you do that?!”
What was your biggest challenge during the course?
I felt like I had to rewire my brain to tackle problems in a different way. In my previous job, even on what felt like a design-heavy day, I was only flexing my creative and right-brained skills for a couple of hours. Using creativity to solve problems, produce results and pushing visual ideas to their limits all day every day for 12 weeks—and the rest of my life was a hard but rewarding adjustment.
What are some of your proudest career achievements since graduating?
Getting a job! Seriously though, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find a design job after graduation and that quitting my former job was a huge mistake. In any creative field, you constantly doubt yourself and whether your work stacks up to what’s around you. I was so thankful to get job offers (even bad ones!) and hear that people were impressed with my portfolio. It was awesome to see the same success for all my peers in the program as well.
Visit Megan’s website and read her full interview on the blog.
Don’t let the roller coaster of starting a new career scare you or make you doubt your worth.
Visual Designer, McKinsey & Company
Megan Dweck
If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting at Shillington, what would it be?
Trust the process. You will get a lot of feedback and suggestions from teachers and peers and though some of it may be hard to hear, you shouldn’t shut any of it out.
You may really like something you created or an idea you had, but if you trust that everyone around you will push you to improve your work, you’ll end up with something better than you imagined it could be.
How did the course build your skill set?
In addition to internalizing the design process, the Shillington program made me a Creative Suite rock star. I appreciated that we learned application shortcuts from the start. It has definitely been a differentiating factor since I’ve entered the design field—I can do things faster and cleaner than other design-school graduates and sometimes even experienced designers say “wow, how’d you do that?!”
What was your biggest challenge during the course?
I felt like I had to rewire my brain to tackle problems in a different way. In my previous job, even on what felt like a design-heavy day, I was only flexing my creative and right-brained skills for a couple of hours. Using creativity to solve problems, produce results and pushing visual ideas to their limits all day every day for 12 weeks—and the rest of my life was a hard but rewarding adjustment.
What are some of your proudest career achievements since graduating?
Getting a job! Seriously though, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find a design job after graduation and that quitting my former job was a huge mistake. In any creative field, you constantly doubt yourself and whether your work stacks up to what’s around you. I was so thankful to get job offers (even bad ones!) and hear that people were impressed with my portfolio. It was awesome to see the same success for all my peers in the program as well.
Visit Megan’s website and read her full interview on the blog.
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